It doesn't matter the genre, Vanillaware have an unmistakable style you can instantly spot. This has all of their trademark presentation, along with some pretty uninteresting writing, which outside of 13 Sentinels has always been the weakest element in their games. As a tactics game though, this packed with seemingly endless options to set up your perfect murder squads, and with endless options come many broken setups, which at times can make the game seem like a complete cakewalk. It all gets by on its stunning art and fantastic music, and while it does become a little too braindead easy, I had a good 20 hours where it was challenging and engaging to fight through the battles, in fact maybe the game would benefit from just being shorter, something I've also felt about the Fire Emblem games on the Switch. I generally had a good time though, and despite some problems with difficulty (including it swinging the other way for a stupid hard final boss) and length, this takes all the right lessons from other tactics games while also having its own unique spin on things. Let's be real though, there's a big bear with a hammer that strikes a pose when he wins a fight, that's surely GOTY material, right?

Call of Duty 2 is a classic that, just like the first game in the series, brings back some great memories for me.
This game throws you into the thick of World War II with three different campaigns, allowing you to see the war from the perspectives of American, British, and Soviet soldiers. Each campaign offers a decent variety of missions and environments, keeping the experience fresh and engaging.
The historical accuracy is pretty good. Whether you’re storming the beaches of Normandy or fighting in the streets of Stalingrad, the game does a great job of making you feel like you're part of the action. Some missions are intense, some are suspenseful, capturing the chaos and heroism of WWII battles.

Unlike many shooters at the time, this game ditched health packs in favor of regenerating health. This made the game feel less frustrating compared to its predecessor, allowing you to stay in the action without constantly hunting for health packs.
The main menu of Call of Duty 2 was a nice touch, with a very war-ish song and theme that set the tone perfectly.
Graphically, Call of Duty 2 was a leap forward. It looked good back in the day and still holds up pretty well.
Both Call of Duty 1 and 2 laid the groundwork for the series with their straightforward WWII gameplay. However, the modern "Call of Duty" games have expanded and evolved into something entirely different, the difference is stark. While today's games offer a lot more in terms of features and content, there's a certain charm and authenticity to the older titles that I miss.

I wish they would remaster the older Call of Duty games, as they were the ones most true to the series' roots. Call of Duty 2 remains a classic, and an underrated game, reminding us of what the series used to be and how it is now.

A truly beautiful game that goes apeshit on the innate David vs Goliath fantasy. Shadow of the Colossus is an industry-changing game and this is a perfect remake of it.

Yes, the controls are objectively dogshit, that is but one part of the game's genius. Climbing an enormous beast should not be easy, and this is communicated best through the controls. The grab controls in particular enamour me. Holding down R2 like your life depends on it, on the back of a thrashing colossus; the protagonist’s urge to survive is streamed to you through the controller. The music is, of course, angelic and a cornerstone of the game, but some of the song transitions are really jarring. Perhaps I'm spoiled by modern audio design but it really pulls me out of the experience when it feels like I’m skipping through a Spotify playlist each boss.

I could dither on about the perfections of this game forever, but many better writers than me have already talked the topic to death. There is, and perhaps will never be, a game like Shadow of the Colossus. I cannot recommend it higher.

I've owned this since it came out, it was one of those weird impulse purchases, even though I'd never played either of the other NMH games. I originally made it to just over the halfway point, I feel like I'd had enough of its bullshit by that point, and the weird gear changing minigame felt like real trial and error... Which I think is the point of the whole game.

And that's where the game part of it falls apart. It's more of a commentary on the nature of video game violence, game development, and the pretty shitty culture that surrounds this wonderful hobby. It's also a bunch of setup for what would be No More Heroes 3, but if you've played any of these games, this one included, none of it matters at all.

The game itself is mostly a top down, murder all the enemies in an arena kind of thing, where each stage introduces increasingly more annoying gimmicks, and at nearly ten hours (including the DLC that has the actual ending of the game) its simple, slashy, powers on a cooldown combat seriously wears out its welcome, especially when it's also a nearly ten hour excuse to just say - SPOILER - "Play more indie games".

Sure, watch the text adventure stuff and the incredible video game intros on YouTube, they're truly weird and wonderful things with striking aesthetics, but don't ever feel the need to slog through the actual game part because it's pretty miserable.

(Review based on ~20 hours spent getting the true ending, did not do too much side stuff)

I admired Dragon's Dogma II more than I loved it. The parts that everyone says are great -- the silliness of your Pawns, the intelligent semi-autonomous behavior of your party, the unpredictability of encounters, the crawling on big monsters -- make for a game that is very fun and cool and largely unlike anything else out there.

Everything around the edges nearly sinks it: Bad framerate (on a PS5), flimsy story and main questline, poor loot distribution (everything I have ever needed was in a shop), obscure quests with non-intuitive solutions, horrendous stamina, and relatively few enemy types. I might do a second playthrough someday (maybe when DLC comes out), but I left my time ready for it to be over. Is it cool? Yes. Do the pros outweigh the cons? I would argue they don't for most players I would recommend a game like this to.

Charles Dickens once said: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness." Weepboop once said of Kingdom Hearts III: "It was the times."

My favorite part about beating a Kingdom Hearts title is reflecting on the twenty to thirty hours I spent playing the game and asking myself if I ever actually understood the plot.

For the ninth time, the answer is no. I don't fucking understand Kingdom Hearts.

I'm watching the credits roll as we speak, or rather as I monologue and I don't understand who half of the characters in the final crawl were. I don't understand what the Kingdom Hearts is. I don't understand the difference between Terra, Terra Xehanort, Ansem, Ansem the wise, and Xemnas. Every one of these I play, I realize that one Dunkey video where he goes and explains the plot of these games in jumbled detail was actually the most coherent and lore accurate depiction of the "lore" of the Kingdom Hearts universe. What the third mainline installment of this series succeeds in doing is putting together a crustless, playable, and mostly enjoyable experience to actually put in your hands. Gone is the garbage combo stun of KH1 & 2, gone are the obtrusive and malformed mechanics of the spinoffs like Chain of Memories and Birth by Sleep, and in is just good ol' hack and slash with fun buttons to press that make you do more damage and actually combo for once. The combat isn't perfect, resoundingly far from it in fact, but I'll be damned if I didn't actually enjoy fighting things from time to time. I didn't understand the spells and the saturation of gauges and bars Sora has to watch out for, but for the vast majority of the game it was coherent to utilize from a gameplay perspective. In closing of the mechanics, the formchanging was pretty neat and a great way to emphasize using different keyblades.

Outside of that, praise ends at saying it's pretty and Face my Fears was a great opener.

So where does KH3 falter? The answer is an unironic and genuine: everywhere else. The plot is mumbo jumbo complete nonsense. I presume it was written by an AI generated Animal Crossing character in their near-Simlish lingua franca, and Tetsuya Nomura scaled the southern slopes of Mount Parnassus to communicate with the Oracle of Delphi. Here he presented the acting script of Kingdom Hearts III to Pythia, who consulted her clergy around the tholos. The priests then interpreted the words and presented them to Nomura in dactylic hexameter. Nomura returned to Square Enix's offices and completely guessed at what they wrote, thus resulting in the plot and script of Kingdom Hearts III. I am in complete belief that there was nobody in the writing room at Square Enix that had the ability to say no to a creative endeavor, and all the "what ifs" were met with a unanimous "YES YES YES." I don't know why we visit any of the Disney worlds we do as Sora, or why we are tasked with playing out a shortform version of their cinematic storylines in this game. Seriously, do I really need to play Pirates of the Carribean 2 in a video game? No! Do I need to play Tangled to understand the story of Rapunzel? No! Do I need to hear Idina Menzel sing "Let it Go" and play out the events of Frozen in this game? NO. None of this adds up to a coherent or pleasant game to play. I excused it in Olympus in the first few worlds because I figured KH3 might be setting up a legitimate need to jump between Disney/Pixar IP's as part of the overarching storyline, but it became clear that they felt the need to run through their properties to attempt to appeal to fanservice and remind the player how strong Disney's portfolio is fiscally.

The fact that the mobile game I watched a summary movie for in the KINGDOM HEARTS HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, forgot everything about because it was incoherent and senseless, only to find out it was probably the most integral lore to this game is hysterically hilarious to me. I assume a majority of people who played this game or consider themselves KH fans skipped the mobile content entirely, and they're probably even more confused than I was. This is like if you somehow made it all the way to Star Wars Episode IX only to find out that the Star Wars Holdiay Special was the most integral plot to Papa Palpatine's revenge. In the final scenes and resolution of fourty years of film glory and cultural impact, Chewbacca's family come out and free the galaxy of the Sith. That's what Kingdom Hearts 3 feels like, we got Holiday Special'd in Episode IX. I won't spoil but the post-credits scene of KHIII frustrated me to an end previously undiscovered because it pulls this card again. The mobile game, why the damn mobile game? Why couldn't, I don’t know... even the worst game in the series in Chain of Memories been the integral one? I get Birth By Sleep made a large presence in this game and its overall narrative, but why is the mobile game the big hitter here?

The best part of KHIII and this review is I originally had this game as a much better score, but over thinking out my talking points I've reduced it by a half star with each new grievance. How did they fumble the bag this hard? How will Kingdom Hearts IV do it even harder? What does Sora actually do in this game? Why can everyone survive in everyone else’s heart? Seriously how many people are inside of Sora's heart? Why is there a character named Xigbar? Why is his non-nobody name BRAIG. WHO NAMES A CHARACTER BRAIG. I'm happy to be done with Kingdom Hearts (for now.) I'm happy this series cannot hurt me any longer. I am free, I am clean. I can shower and not be disgusted with who I am. I can make coffee and wave to my neighbors. I can open the blinds and say hello to the sun. Maybe the real Kingdom Hearts was the friends we complained to about this series along the way.

I don't recommend Kingdom Hearts III to anyone. It's the most playable and enjoyable Kingdom Hearts (not including Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth By Sleep - A Fragmentary Passage) to play, but it's still unfortunately a Kingdom Hearts title.

The cold never bothered me anyway.

It's immediately apparent that this is a significant step up in visuals, with much smoother gameplay, and is generally far weirder and funnier than the first game.

It's still got a mean streak a mile wide, but I think the boost in its absurdity and ultraviolence makes some of these shitty characters far more amusing this time around. Travis even has fleeting moments where he says something that almost resembles something human, but its all still nonsense so who really cares.

For the first chunk of the game it almost feels like the increased volume of cutscenes has eaten into the level budget, with many being very short or almost non existent, but by the end I found a couple of stages to be far too long. I do however enjoy how these games just throw new characters at you like they're regulars in a TV show... and then they just die in violent, bloody ways never to be thought or spoken of again. It can at times all just feel like a big inside joke, but I think that's probably some of the appeal, and is most definitely intentional.

In general, I think I prefer the second game a little more with its less mean writing and reduced busywork, but on the flipside the new training minigames truly suck, and there are a couple of very annoying bosses late in the game despite an overall decrease in difficulty.

It's somehow more ambitious, and yet strangely smaller than the first game, but I think a lot of the harsher edges sanded off benefit the overall experience. It's good fun though, but I still do like the third game the most.